Many managerial decisions will boil down to that familiar bottom line -- the return on investment. This approach only makes good business sense. But it can be hard to measure or strictly quantify some of the benefits a content management system like MediaClay confers.

The problem is, many of the benefits are delivered in the form of "soft dollars." Soft-dollar rewards include things like improved employee and customer satisfaction, improved employee productivity, improved employee and customer retention, improved intradepartmental communication, and improved corporate-wide collaboration.

It can be hard to apply fiscal metrics to such benefits. Some managers don't even bother trying to do so. Some believe a detailed ROI analysis would exhaust more time and resource than simply going ahead and building the content management solution itself. This may certainly be true, considering the modest total cost of ownership of Comspec's Mid-Market content Management solution, MediaClay.

Nevertheless, here are some of the more tangible returns that investors in MediaClay can expect to see.

Hardcopy Reduction
MediaClay extends the ability and reduces the cost to communicate information throughout the establishment and to the external world. Savings can accumulate by replacing paper with electronic documents. Not only is the physical cost of hardcopy reduced, so are the administrative costs of maintaining, storing, searching, and sharing the hard medium. This means duplication, production, and distribution expenditures can be drastically decreased.

Time Savings
With hardcopy document management systems, approximately 20% of an employee's time can be expected to be spent searching for information. That equates to roughly eight hours a week. This time is as good as wasted, since the search itself provides no concrete gain. The gain comes only from what is done with the information after it has been found. With MediaClay as part of your electronic document management system, you can expect this wasted time to be decimated.

Knowledge Preservation
Sometimes employees change projects, are transferred to other departments, or move on altogether -- taking their knowledge and experience with them. MediaClay allows companies to gather, store, and collate all the knowledge of employees, past, present, and future.

Improved Organizational Efficiency
As a collaborative tool, MediaClay ensures that all levels and areas of the establishment know as much as they need to about what is going on at other levels and in the other areas. The improved efficiency of information sharing through content creation and management makes the duplication of effort and the redundancy of tasks far less likely.

Employee Autonomy
Since MediaClay moves the access and maintenance of relevant industry and corporate information to one centralized location, and stores that information in one open-standardized and fully repurposable format, employees become better equipped to find, make use of, and update the material they need. In this way, intermediaries, messengers, and translators are no longer needed to communicate information between departments. Empowered, autonomous employees with direct access to content creation and management tools are sure to be more productive, make better decisions, and derive greater satisfaction from their work.